The first pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring is now available. This alpha concentrates on updating to the major desktop components of the distribution, including KDE 4.2 Beta 2, GNOME 2.25.2, Xfce 4.6 Beta 2, X.org server 1.5, and kernel 2.6.28 rc8. It is also the first distribution to introduce the major new Tcl/Tk release, 8.6. The alpha is available only in the DVD Free edition with a traditional installer and no proprietary applications; future pre-releases will add the live CD One edition with proprietary drivers. Please help test this first pre-release and report bugs to Mandriva.

2009.0 KDE 4 would not work on this newer machine at all, and I still have no idea why. All I got was a blank screen, and this was bizarre because it was working on that machine under 2008.1.

Is your graphics card composite-compatible? The card in my desktop PC is not, but when I enable OpenGL-based compositing anyway I get exact the same error. It could be that there's a bug in composite detection and that it gets enabled even though it should not.

There was (and still is, even now) constant intrusion by apps which are transitioning from Qt3 to Qt4. The whole menu was full of apps with double entries (one for KDE3, one for KDE4). In the end I just gave up in exasperation.

I purged my installation of KDE 3 apps a while ago so no double entries for me. :-)
Too bad it's partially Mandriva's fault that some apps still don't have KDE4 ports. K3b's main developer works for Mandriva, but they think that tagging files through Nepomuk is more important than burning DVDs...
Well, Brasero works fine in KDE so I no longer care about K3b.